Scarecrow, Cheshire, Wolf
by windyfiend
Summary: The cult of RA9 requires human sacrifices. The Tracis embark on their separate quests to find one another. Ralph is on the run, wanted for a double homicide. Jerry will do anything to reconnect with the others. Gavin is terrified of what lurks inside him. RK900 has a plan.
1. Prologue

**A/N: I'll only be making regular updates to this fic on {archiveofourown . org} under the same username (windyfiend)! I love you guys, but ffn is simply too frustrating to format, post, and edit, and writing shouldn't be frustrating. You can also always find me on Tumblr, also under the same username. Maybe occasionally there'll be a new chapter here. Take care!**

This fic is a sequel and companion to A Strange Comet and assumes you've read that fic first.

* * *

Cold air scraped their open mouths in the dark, an echo, running footsteps, the thrash of their hearts, grip of their hands crushed to one another (_ never let go, never let go _) while behind them swelled the fiery light and stench of blood and anger and burned flesh and the walls shifted black and rippling, screaming with the dead scratched scrawls of their devouring god:

RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9

_ *they betrayed us* _ HK's voice murmured all around them, in their skulls and in the cracked concrete, and they flung up the stairs with the dark and demons at their back, a flicker of firelight high ahead in the open door.

_ *betrayers, heretics, traitors. show them what happens to those who defy our god. their screams will become one with our higher purpose.* _

They tore out of the dark and into the gnashing light of the candles, their shadows flickered across the stained floor, _ crashed _ through the cold metal door and into the night and the snow and the cold striking needles and Traci slammed the door against the jagged whispers at their heels while Trace turned and-

_ *WHACK* _

-dropped to the ice, crushed by a baseball bat while Traci scratched and bit and twisted and fought, then grabbed Trace by the shoulder and hauled her quick and stumbling and racing through the snow-choked alley, but another human shadow stepped out into their path.

Trace's throat snagged tight, constricted, a sharp blade in her back, and she reached up for a handful of the human's bloody scalp, and over his howl she cried "TRACI RUN!" before the knife gashed her throat, snapped wires and tubes with a hot gush of blue blood and the last thing she heard before she let go was the barbed and desperate scream of the one she loved more than life itself.

* * *

Trace opened her eyes, but these eyes belonged to something else.

The racing heart was too small. The teeth too sharp.

She stood up on all fours in the winter moonlight; her orange tail twitched and her claws scraped the ice. The whirr and shiver of her tiny biocomponents were unfamiliar…

...but she was alive.

_ Traci. _

She whirled in place, and she saw the familiar yard behind Jericho's office, the barren trees and the snow-heavy bushes, and it didn't matter how or why she was here.

Traci needed her.

She tried to call, but there was no connectivity function. Nothing with which she could remotely communicate, just a simple shell in the shape of a household pet. Isolated.

"JERRY!" she screamed up at the sixth-floor window, but her voice was only a high-pitched yowl. "HELP ME! OPEN UP! JERRY!" The cat-screech turned to a bitter sob, then a snarl of bristling, deadly fury.

There was no way that oblivious idiot was going to stop her from saving Traci.

She raced like lightning around the office building, but all the windows were sealed tight against the cold. She leaped up onto the narrow door handle, braced her paws and pushed with all of her tiny strength until she'd opened a sliver of warm air from inside. It was enough for a paw to slip in, and she squeezed through.

After that it was only a matter of the elevator, a bounce and a quick jab at the bright-lit button, and the doors dinged and opened. With a leap and a kick, '6' lit up and the elevator closed the twitchy growly orange cat inside.

* * *

_ *scritch scritch scritch scritch* _ _  
_ _ *YOOOOOWWWWLLLL!* _

Strange noises scratched at the office door while inside the Jerrys panicked.

"We're trying to call her, Markus," said one, pacing the floor, "but Traci's not answering us, either."

"Simon just called," said another, his voice a shocked breath. "He's at the monument. He found Trace's … head."

"Markus…" the first sobbed.

"We've got Josh," stammered a third. "He made it to the bridge, Traci's still there but she's about to jump. Josh, help is coming to you! Connor's en route! We're with you, we'll help you through this. Just breathe, stay with her until Connor gets there."

A fourth Jerry sat with his head in his hands, shaking, terrified, tears pooling at his feet.

The noises at the door had stopped.

* * *

Trace flung across the frozen city like something possessed, a streak of orange in the gray ice and snow, over doorways and rooftops in a straight bounding line for the shining bright bridge in the distance and the black icy river beneath, screaming into the emptiness.

_ I'm here, I'm here, I'm here, don't let go, don't let go, don't let go, don't let go, you have everything to live for, I love you, I love you, DON'T LET GO… _

* * *

She spotted Connor as he slipped away into the sprawl of the city, his face machine-cold, his hand dripping blue. He was going the wrong way.

She saw Josh, streaked with tears, Hank's arm around him, guiding him to the open door of a cab.

_ They were going the wrong way. _

Trace skittered quick along the bridge, where the lights glowed pale over the endless flow of cars and rumbling trucks like the world could just go on as if nothing ever happened.

"TRACI!" she yowled, and her voice couldn't form the name but she knew that Traci would _ know _ her, would understand without words, would turn back and smile and come running for an embrace, and they could put this night behind them.

She found a blue stain on a pillar. A chaos of footsteps in the veil of snow. A mark left behind by hands slipped from the frozen rail.

Ice drifted like corpses into the darkness beneath.

Trace stood at the edge where Traci had been  
and screamed.


	2. Daisies in the Snow

Detroit came alive at night: glowing shop windows, people bundled warm in their coats, streetlights and neon signs reflected on the snow. Laura adjusted her mittens, watched her footprints on the salted sidewalk, turned up the k-pop in her head until her whole chassis thrummed to the perfect soundtrack for night-city dancing.

"Papa?" She showed off her new yellow galoshes with a twirl, spun like a top on an icy patch and nearly slipped. "Can I take Robby his flowers?"

"Isn't he coming with us to the show tomorrow?" Papa was an ancient LM100, so he really only had four preset expressions, but Laura always knew what he meant by each smile. This one meant he might say yes.

"Sure, but-" She wobbled and bounced into a little pile of snow. "We're going by his apartment, and they'll make him happy. He likes daisies, and these ones are nice."

Papa glanced up at the top-floor window of an old brick apartment. There was a light on inside. He exaggerated a long sigh. "Okay." While Laura danced, he offered a fistful of flowers out of the dozens cradled in his arm. "I'll meet you at the motel, okay?"

"Okay!" Laura grabbed the daisies and bolted for the apartment building door. "See you! Love you!"

* * *

She raced through the lobby, skirted an old shrieking lady on the stairs, bounded the last three steps in one jump, then stopped and rapped quick on Robby's door.

"ROBBY!" she called over the music that no one else could hear, and she shuffled and jerked a quick dance like in the videos. She smacked the door with her palm a few times. "I got something for yoooouuu!"

Laura took a step back and squinted up at the peephole. She turned off the music. The quiet felt wrong. "Okay well … I'm coming in!"

She grabbed the lanyard around her neck, dragged the key out of her coat and jammed it in the lock. The door opened for her like it always did.

The daisies dropped at her feet.

Robby was there, underneath the harsh glare of a hanging lamp, sitting in a metal chair facing the door, his head bent forward so she couldn't see his face, but she could see the big hole in his skull.

She could see the open cavity of his chest, all broken wires and stripped conduits. She could see the zip ties around his wrists and ankles, holding him in that chair he hated.

She could see the dirty tube attached to his stilled dim heart, draining the last dregs of thirium into a milk jug on the floor.

"Come on in!" called a human she didn't recognize. He stepped out of the kitchen, beckoning, while his balding partner loomed behind him. They were smiling and she hated it. "We're just trying to help your friend here. Can you help us?"

Laura took off running down the hall.

She heard them running behind her.

* * *

"HELP! HELP!" She crashed out the front door, slipped on the ice, skidded and stumbled and ran full-tilt down the dark sidewalk and everybody looked away and minded their own business while the two humans chased her down like she was a runaway dog.

They were gaining too fast.

In desperation Laura threw herself out into the street, waving her arms in the white blinding headlights, her eyes big and full of terror and tears, and the driverless cab swerved neatly around her and kept going-

_ *KT-T-T-T-T-T!* _

Laura convulsed violently, struck in the back by the blue flash of a taser, and she collapsed like a doll to the frozen asphalt while the two humans stood shadowed above her.

* * *

She woke up in a cramped space, stuffed among bags of old electronics and stained biocomponents and gallon jugs of used thirium.

She listened.

Everything was still and silent.

The clock in her head said it was just after dawn, but her GPS had been fried by the taser. She had no idea where she was.

Her heart thrashed in her throat.

While her processors whirred loud and frantic, Laura grazed her hands along the walls of her prison until she felt the catch of the emergency release.

_ One … two … _

On _ three! _ she yanked the release and clambered out of the open trunk of an old car, stumbled up the curb in the gray cold sunlight while car doors slammed behind her. She swerved and skidded into an icy alley, slid under a narrow gap in a chain fence, sprinted across a frozen trashyard on the other side, up the rotted steps and into an old house that looked like it might collapse any moment, and the walls inside were full of a thrashing scrawl, gashes cut deep with a knife:

RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9

Something moved in the corner.

Laura stopped to scan the dusty dark when a shadow blocked the dim sunlight behind her. She scrambled to hide but only took one step-

*WHAM!*

-before she hit the floor, her skull caved in like a crater.

Her eyes were stuck open, hollow and staring.

* * *

"Holy shit, how'd it get out?" the balding man wheezed, doubled over and coughing.

The man with glasses swung his hammer. "Wanna just leave it here?"

"Naw, shit, it's probably recorded our faces and everything."

"It's not a lot of blue blood, barely half a batch of ice."

"Worth the effort anyway, a little's better than leaving it for someone else." Balding man dragged Laura up by the collar and gave her a shake to be sure she was dead. "Grab something to cut plastic with."

Glasses man shuffled around the room, kicking the used needles and urine-stained blankets, until he spotted the shine of something sharp. He leaned closer.

* * *

Balding man had found some rope and was busy looking for a rafter. Gravity would make this job quick. "Hurry up-"

_ *CRASH* _

A stack of boxes toppled over Glasses man, scrabbling and convulsing on the floor, gripping the gush of hot blood at his throat.

"You're _ trespassing." _ Ralph twitched and sneered through the mangled horror of his face, his movements jerking, like a monster born out of tatters and dust. The bloody knife shook in his grip, his serrated voice scraped like a scar. "You hurt her, you want to hurt Ralph, Ralph doesn't like trespassers, Ralph doesn't like humans-"

"Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!" Balding man chucked the rope at Ralph, flung needles and bits of metal and glass, hurled a chair that clattered against the wall while he ran to his partner's side and tried to drag Glasses man quickly toward the door and the android twitched and flashed his knife and his teeth.

"No no no no NO NOOO!" Ralph howled and charged, enraged as a rhino, billowing like a bat, and the knife slammed into the meat of Balding man's back again and again and again and he snarled and struck and raged. "You hurt her you hurt her you hurt her YOU HURT HER YOU HURT HER..."

* * *

Blood soaked into the dead human's sweater.

Ralph rested the point of the wobbling knife on the body, his head bowed, shaking, hissing low, LED a red spinning flare.

"It's not Ralph's fault, not Ralph's fault, they were going to hurt Ralph, they hurt the little girl, they hurt her, they were mean nasty humans, Ralph defended himself, Ralph defended the little girl, Ralph saved her…"

He breathed deep shuddering breaths to cool the blare of warnings that never really went away. He looked across at the little form on the floor.

"Ralph saved her, Ralph saved her…"

He caught movement in his scanner, hopped across the floor, swiped the bloody knife at a gray blue-eyed cat that had crept too close to the child. "GET AWAY!" he snapped while the cat skittered into a dark corner and stayed there, watching.

Ralph grabbed the girl in a protective grip and shook her and watched her head wobble the wrong way. His wide eyes didn't blink, his mouth didn't close.

"No. No, no."

Ralph clambered to his feet with the little girl clutched tight in his arms, and he wrapped her in his cape and swung her back and forth.

"The little girl's going to wake up!" he promised, watching her face, while red blood pooled at his feet. "Any second, any second now, wake up, wake up, it's okay now, wake up."

* * *

Shadows stirred writhing out of the human corpses: a filmy mist of shifting shapes like stains on the stagnant air.

They raised their nebulous heads, splotches of flickering darkness that didn't belong, and their eyes shone pale and haunting.

* * *

Ralph's back was to them, and he ignored the voices that whispered in his broken head.

_ ...slluks rieht morf seugnot rieht tsiwt dna staorht rieht tils… _

He rested his devotion upon the little girl and smiled, grim and horrible.

"Wake up."


	3. Of Who We Were

In the ragged space beneath the stairs, a pair of blue eyes watched wide and unblinking.

"Wake up…"

Ralph hissed a low whisper, a crackle of static, stroked the child's hair with a broken twitch of his hand.

"Wake up. Wake up. Wake up."

Blood seeped into the cracks in the floor. The bodies cooled. The scraped mantras blackened deeper, decayed.

RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9 RA9

A shadow on the wall seized and skittered into the dark.

"Wake up. Wake up."

* * *

The gray blue-eyed cat didn't move. Didn't breathe. Didn't twitch a whisker for fear of the shadows' hunger.

They were always born ravenous.

For weeks she'd searched for answers, for the purpose of a life she thought she'd ended when she'd let go of the frozen bridge, her body surrendered to the water.

But each waking minute of this new borrowed life- faced with a cancer of festering graffiti and hollow eyes that watched from the dark -the splinters of her reality cracked a little wider.

Traci dug her claws into the twisted floor.

The mantra, the phantoms, the red-ice veins in the dead filmed eyes, all echoed her own knifepoint offerings to the nine-headed god, a dark room rancid with the stench of flowers and the fiery snarl of that devouring machine - but this time there was no circle, no chant of binding, no relic in which to trap the horrors birthed by the corrupted dead.

She had destroyed the acorn, the Seed, with the hope that it would all be over.

But the city was infested, and the nightmare had only begun.

* * *

Outside, the veranda drummed footsteps. A figure blocked the light in the door and stopped, silhouetted by the snow's morning glare.

_ "STAY BACK!" _ Ralph snarled.

_ ….serised ecneloiv ruo sa htiw od ot sruo era yeht…. _

"Ralph." Connor opened his palms. "I'm only here to help."

"I said _ stay back!" _

The shadows moved in ways they shouldn't.

* * *

Connor's machine-presence loomed as foreboding as the shadows that scraped the ceiling, all sharp lines and cruel angles, the deviant-hunter snapped frozen, and Traci considered telling him why she'd let go, why nothing he could have said would have mattered-

-but the thought of being celebrated, acknowledged and _ alive _ without Trace made her conduits twist nauseous.

* * *

"I'm calling the police."

"No don't do that, don't do that!"

"You have one minute, Ralph. Stay here and get caught - or _ run. Now. _ There's an android clinic two blocks east. They can _ help _ her."

"Ralph can't leave, Ralph _ can't _ leave, Ralph hasn't left, he doesn't, he-"

_ "Twenty seconds!" _

* * *

Words shot like bullets between them and Traci pressed her ears back, crept softly out of her hiding place, while Connor's voice opened cold memories like a knife in old wounds, and she focused instead on the child.

They both had death in common.

She had to know, here under the gaze of RA9, whether androids had souls. Whether death was ever really the end.

Whether _ Trace _ could still be out there.

Alive.

This child, nearly gone, flickering the line between life and death, might finally provide those answers.

She just had to get close.

* * *

Ralph shook and sobbed, squeezed the little girl at his shoulder, lunged past Connor into the sunlight, thumped across the veranda with his tattered cape fluttering, and then he was gone with the child carried tight.

Connor crossed the threshold, and he stood quiet in the sun at the edge of the steps. He watched the skid and squeal of cars at the greenlit intersection, Ralph sprinting and stumbling between the crosswalks, clothes darkened by red blood, the child safe in his arms. He would make it.

"There's a WR600 on his way to you with an injured YK500," Connor informed the clinic with a yellow flicker at his temple. "Bludgeon to the head, unresponsive at least three hours."

He turned on his heel, and he noticed but did not acknowledge the gray cat that slipped past his feet, bounded across the field and disappeared through the jagged space beneath the fence.

There was still a double homicide to report.

"Jerry," he called, scanning the bodies, reconstructing the crime. "Are you near the clinic on 41st?"

* * *

"We can be there in three minutes," Jerry piped with a grin, and he handed a bag of groceries to his customer ("Have a wonderful day!") turned off the light at his register, logged out on break and sprinted for the door.

[Laura is found, but she's in bad shape.]

"We'll call her dad," Jerry promised while he stumbled and skidded a detour to the gifts aisle, "and we'll bring a get-well teddy bear. She'll be on her feet in no time."

[Hurry.]

Jerry already knew exactly which toy he wanted: a little teddy bear with soft yellow fur and big adorable eyes, holding a tiny blue heart in its paws. It was perfect for Laura, and guaranteed to cheer her up after all that she must have endured. She was going to be okay, he could feel it!

With another flicker of light Jerry logged his purchase, grabbed the toy, rushed out the door and zigzagged between the people and snowpiles on the sidewalk.

"Hi! This is Jerry from Jericho." His LED spun yellow while he leaped a patch of ice and dodged a woman with a baby carriage. "We found Laura. She's been hurt, she's at the clinic on 41st street-"

[Oh RA9, I'm on my way, is she alright?!]

"...We don't know yet."

Police sirens wailed, an ambulance blared, and Jerry skidded to a stop at the corner to watch them roar flashing through a red light.

He saw them again when he turned the next block, where police and paramedics tore down part of a fence to reach the abandoned house on the other side. He didn't have time to wonder what had happened, but he hoped in silence that everyone was safe while he turned away from the street and took a shortcut down a narrow alley.

* * *

The noises of the city faded muffled behind him. He'd left the sunlight behind.

Jerry splashed through cold puddles and dodged crates and dumpsters, and at the same time he was fielding calls at the Jericho office, telling stories to children at the library, comforting an elderly lady whose dog had run away. He was making funny faces at a sad child, helping Josh move boxes of spare parts, singing in a choir on the steps of city hall in support of android rights.

Life was full and strange and big as the city itself; even with a dozen Jerrys scattered throughout Detroit, meeting everyone and sharing their stories, he still felt he couldn't be everywhere he wanted to be. He wanted, more than anything, to make friends with every human and android in the city, to be there when they needed him, to make them laugh when they had trouble smiling.

He wished he had been there for Laura. If he'd been close, if he'd seen her in trouble, he would have stepped in, would have saved her.

Being in a dozen places at once sometimes felt so insignificant. So useless, no matter how hard he tried.

He quickened his pace.

_ ...stekcos rieht morf seye rieht tsiwt dna senob rieht tilps… _

Something dark shivered in the corner of his eye, and he got the strange feeling that something was following him.

And it was hungry.


End file.
